[UPDATE] School Shootings

So Shannon TWatts was mouthing off about school shootings again, after the LA middle school shooting. She claimed:

This is the 14th American school shooting in 2018

Someone replied, asking for a list of those shootings, And TWatts told her to Google “Everytown school shootings”. She couldn’t be bothered to provide a link.

So I searched it and found that “Everytown” list. It lists “school shootings” but doesn’t provide links. Per Everytown,

Consistent with expert advice and common sense, Everytown uses a straightforward, fair, and comprehensive definition for a school shooting: any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds, as documented by the press and, when necessary, confirmed through further inquiries with law enforcement or school officials.

Two suicides (one only coincidentally on school grounds), one negligent discharge by a cop, two shots from off campus that hit buildings with no injuries, two drive-bys from off campus with no injuries, one drive-by off campus with no injuries, one shot at 1AM at an “event venue” on an extended college campus, four under-age students shooting students, and one guy killed “near” a school.

So 29% of Everytown’s “school shootings” don’t even meet their own definition of “school shooting.” Some clearly had nothing to do with “school” other than happening on campus well after hours, typically by non-students entering the grounds. One was a freaking cop authorized to have that gun. They had to include a shooting that didn’t involve students, faculty, or school grounds; “near.” Of the shootings that met Everytown’s own definition, most shooters were breaking existing laws in even possessing firearms. Virtually all broke existing laws in bringing the gun on campus.

Real school shootings are a bad thing. They should be addressed, fixed, ended. But inflating the numbers with other incidents is panic-mongering, and shrouds and distorts the facts of real school shootings.

Added, 2/7/2018: They have a couple more! Let’s see what there is to see…

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4 thoughts on “[UPDATE] School Shootings”

Tangentially, I had a similar conversation with a “gun control” proponent recently. “He” (no way to tell online) pulled the Australia example, pointing out that the U.S. has a “mass shooting” almost every day. Australia, on the other hand, had 13 “mass shootings” before the 1996 gun controls, and zero since. Ergo, “gun control” works.

Ehh… not so fast. I dug into that a little.

Those conflicting statements are only true if you use two different definitions of “mass shooting”.

For U.S. shootings, “he” (and by extension, the “gun controllers”) is using the Everytown/VPC definition of (paraphrasing) “four or more people shot and/or killed in a single event or location”. For Australia, “he” was using the Australian definition of (paraphrasing again) “four or more people killed by gunfire in a single event”.

I unraveled “his” argument by providing a list of post-gun-ban “mass shootings” in Australia that meet the Everytown/VPC definition (available on Wikipedia with a little searching), and reminding “him” (with cited source material) that the vast majority of “mass shootings” (VPC definition) in the U.S. are drug- and gang-related; i.e. criminals barred from owning or possessing guns under current law, shooting other criminals. Ergo, “gun control” doesn’t work.

The take-away is this: Anti-freedom arguments from anti-freedom people universally rely on inconsistent definitions, falsified evidence, and shifting goal posts, when they aren’t just outright lies. The Everytown list of “school shootings” (many/most of which aren’t) is just another example.

Also, the Australian definition seems to include an unwritten “public venue” caveat, as a 2014 incident where a father shot and killed his wife and three children before turning the gun on himself (read: shooting, five dead) is almost never counted. So the numbers themselves are suspect; what else has been falsely excluded?

I think that’s one of the reasons that story I put up before this one about the 12 year old girl in the Calif “school shooting” because she thought it was a “toy” gun, saddened me. One, the columnist calling it an “eruption” of gun fire, for one bullet. If one bullet, how all the damage, which now we know wasn’t from a bullet. But mostly articles like this that I run across https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/idaho/articles/2018-01-29/bill-encouraging-gun-safety-courses-in-idaho-schools-returns different states would like to offer kids some kind of safety education. But hoplophobic Demoncrats stand stalwartly in opposition. After all “its for the children”.